


Blood is Red, Bruises are Blue

by fluoresce



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Awkward Sherlock, Fluff, Gen, Johnlock - Freeform, Mary who?, Mortified John, Post-Reichenbach, Pre-Slash, guys help, warstans AWAY, what else do I put here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-29 23:06:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1011175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluoresce/pseuds/fluoresce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John thinks life's great when someone cares about you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood is Red, Bruises are Blue

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe my first (completed) Sherlock fic isn't ridden with angst! It's quite an accomplishment for me. This one doesn't quite fit into the fluff genre, but it isn't drenched in despair or have a heart-wrenching insecure!John either. Well, I hope you enjoy it. Please leave a comment if you can!

It isn't like those dreams, this one. It's similar in many ways - brains still scattered all over the chapped ground, blood still flowing from indeterminate directions like some sort of perverse waterfall - but the focus is drastically different. Facing John aren't the massacres of his comrades and his equally horrifying inability to save everyone, but something far worse. Around him, tottering and falling and bleeding and dead, are thousands of Sherlocks in their places. He could swear dreams aren't meant to be so vivid, but his head is near imploding with its incessant throbbing - and his _heart, oh god_.

John learns that when one is standing in a wasteland where one's best friend has been cloned and is being killed off every second, one's heart will palpitate until it would probably grow anatomically impossible, _throbbing_ parts, and convulse and shatter all together, coating the mutilated and uncomfortably familiar bodies around him with parts of him he's never thought of sharing with anyone. Oh, well.

There's a sharp but perpetual tumble that rights the world, and it takes him a few seconds to realise that the heavy breathing pushing him underneath is suddenly isolated and no longer illuminated by gunshots and far-off reverberating explosions. On his arms there's a heavy pressure akin to that of those ropes he had to use on flailing, delirious patients time and time again, and it's with their behaviourism that he tries to tackle it and uproot his terror, struggling to unclasp the vice grip on his forearms.

The off-white, cracked ceiling of his bedroom distorts in the mild yellow of the streetlights, and he rather unanticipatedly registers the dark contortion wavering above his quaking body. Sherlock's warm breathing sounds almost as laboured as his, and with a characteristically clean state of strength he clamps down on John's arms. John rather mindlessly wonders when Sherlock had abandoned his stores for lucidity.

"John," Sherlock says. Only someone who has lived with him and known him for as long as John has would be able to locate the unstable tremor in his voice betraying the tiny bit of concern he emanates. John feels the slight onslaught of said emotion and hangs onto it like a drowning man will clutch at a straw. The horrific images of this same man whose heart is beating, safe in his chest, instead of splattered all over the sparse landscape, fade off into the recesses of his mind where it is sent to the incinerator to be condemned promptly. Sherlock sighs in relief as he searches his eyes and John finds himself, once again, contemplating the consequences of asking to be let in to the factory Sherlock calls his mind.

The gears are turning, he can tell as much. Sherlock has never been apt with sentiment, and the man is certainly grasping at as appropriate a cacophony of words as he can to organise a timeless orchestral piece from the words he isn't acquainted with.

"John," Sherlock repeats, and John understands. The helplessness with which his flatmate attempts to calm him down provides a parallel with his own subservience in the face of terror as bloodcurdling as the nightmares that wreck his mind in the dark of night. He is almost grateful for the impermanence of the shadows in his consciousness as compared to the inherent inability of Sherlock to express his feelings.

At least John can walk out of his smothering shell if he so wishes.

The images are gone now, imprinted in the drafts of his mind's blog, and he swiftly deletes them from the dashboard without so much as a glance. Nights as abbreviated as these prove easy for him to clear his mind of the monsters that stalk it.

Sherlock's lithe body hangs in the stale air and blocks the remaining light as he struggles to find a constant on the soft plush of John's mattress. He appears to run headlong into a dilemma and chooses to get off the bed altogether. Forearms held down previous are liberated, and John sullenly rubs at the red markings, as if to scrub Sherlock off himself.

"Thanks, but please," John sighs, "try not to do that again. Constraining me. Don't give me that look, Sherlock. It can be rather frightening to wake up from helplessness to the exact same thing."

The maddening detective raises a hand and runs it through his curls, an uncharacteristic habit he had picked up from his flatmate.

"Judging by your dilated pupils, and the increased frantic jitters and choked sounds, you were once again having a rerun of your military days. Battlefield, definitely. Powerlessness makes this nightmare similar to the usual ones, but there's something that sets this one apart from the others." Sherlock peers down and searches his eyes, as if he could magically fish out the roll of film John has now firmly seated down on. He reckons he could, too.

"The people - not your mates, are they? Something closer, more personal... Sarah? Mrs Hudson? Harry?" Sherlock prods and deduces and John isn't sure that it's not the fear of him possibly locating accurately the source of his weakness that spurs him to speak.

"Wasn't them. It was you," John says, and looks away at the boring plaster of his walls in abandon. He tries not to blush in the face of this rather moronic, self-proposed surrender of thoughts and emotions he has dished out for Sherlock to feast on.

The silence, if anything, is stifling. Sherlock takes to staring at him this way and that, something he does frequently when deep into deduction but never seems to register as rather rude. John counts a good two minutes. Finally, one perfectly-shaped eyebrow is raised and his lips are parted.

"This has something to do with my absence, doesn't it? You obviously--"

"Don't. Please. I need to sleep," John rubs at his face, and mercilessly drowns the urge to laugh at the pun. Sherlock definitely seems to be fond of rubbing his flatmate's rarely expressed but certain need for him in his face these days.

"That's the thing, isn't it?" Sherlock's voice is soft, almost gentle, and John's eyes snap up to the detective's face that is shrouded in darkness. The seemingly-sculpted cheekbones stick out even in the thickness of the shadows, and the temptation to reach up and touch him where his sharp angles are exposed is great. John thinks himself a disciplined man by the time the detective shifts slightly, encasing his whole face and the urge to touch it in the gloom.

Sherlock's blue eyes are bright, though. They pierce his the way his fingers do the tortured, sweat-soaked bed linen, and the words that come out are vaguely sardonic in nature, "You tell the world that you go to bed right after a nightmare; that you're perfectly alright even though you lie awake for a good part of the night before the ability to fall asleep is no longer a dream."

John scoffs, "That was almost poetic, Sherlock. I had the vague impression that you loathed anything even slightly possessive of beauty." He tries to hide his mortification with the rest of the things he's been hiding for a while now, choosing to fix his eyes on the dull interior of his bedroom instead of Sherlock's pervasive ones.

"Appallingly unfounded. I was hoping you would at least be logical when I pulled you along for a chase that day," Sherlock says. His tone isn't unkind, though. John is beyond embarrassed now; a lot is going through his mind --  _is he deducing what he can from that little titbit now, is he, is he, oh._ He's never been very religious, but now he's pleading with any cosmic being he can reach with his thoughts to keep Sherlock's mind from straying in that direction. The _correct_ direction, unfortunately. And everyone knows how keen Sherlock’s nose is when he’s on a hot trail, pursuing the truth.

Sherlock takes a minute or two to pick through everything. John isn't counting. He's too busy trying unsuccessfully to numb the thudding of his heartbeat even Mrs Hudson must be able to hear through the floorboards.

All of a sudden his flatmate is towering over him, his feet securely on the ground, and a short glance is spared before he's stalking out of the open bedroom door. John hears the staccato of his footsteps, uncharacteristically heavy, go quite a way. An indeterminate length of time spans before the sound of the kettle being turned on reaches his ears, and he bites out a laugh. Trust Sherlock to invest in the belief that tea fixes everything for his flatmate.

"Sherlock," he yells, "I don't want tea at... 3:02 in the morning. Don't waste the gas, please." Sherlock grumbles audibly before he stalks back into the room, his face scrunched up in an expression not unalike what he wears when he's trying to deduce an enigma of some sort. Maybe even akin to the one he was wearing when he was chasing himself in a race to impress Irene Adler. (John still doesn't actually know if Sherlock was really that taken with the Woman as everyone else said, the best friend he is.)

That thought hits a sore spot. He tries to retract the increasingly repulsive feelings he starts to encounter, but it's to no avail - Sherlock has but reached the bedside when John's mouth decides to run away.

"The Woman; did you-"

"Oh, how dreadfully  _boring_ , John. No. Not that question - not now, not ever."

John sighs and tries to disappear into the white bedspread. He's not even tired anymore - heck, he can't remember half of his nightmare at this point in time. Sherlock's evidently at a loss as to what to do with his abnormally long, towering body, and John watches bemusedly as he shifts his balance from one foot to another, and back again. To the rhythm of Niccolò Paganini's _Caprice No. 5 in A minor_. John almost slaps himself when he realises he's humming the piece Sherlock frequently plays to himself, Sherlock's rigid eyes regarding him quietly.

"Have you any needs? If not, I will be going back to the kitchen, where my eyeballs are awaiting me. I hope the quality of the retina hasn't been compromised, if only for your sake." Sherlock is speaking down at him with his nose upturned, and John can't help but recognize the defence mechanism that Sherlock adopts rarely when he's feeling an oncoming assault of _sentiment_.

John isn't sure who the victim of this night is anymore.

He stares up at Sherlock, eyes catching the reflection of the glowing time from his beside clock on his flatmate's cheek. _3:07 am._ Sherlock's been standing in his room for 5 minutes, and it feels like it's been 10 seconds. John isn't sure if it's good that he's grown so accustomed to life with Sherlock - he's never actually been uncomfortable around the man, too.

The first day Sherlock, with his posh coat and long scarf billowing in the winds, swished him away for his first adventure in months, he had immediately taken to the exhilaration of blood rushing through his cobwebbed veins, and the acid of a free run splashing blithely down the walls of his insides. The initial enticement and addiction to the notion of a carefree future with his new genius flatmate ebbed away to unveil something, decidedly (when this was confirmed, he would like to know), even more fatal.

Comfort. The easy sort, where you know you don't have to speak a word to the person beside you to continue the bond that has formed over the tides of time, crashing and overlapping each thread to complete an undeniably impregnable rope that strangles everything between the two of you.

"I'm alright, you great big ninny. You can go back to your... experiment."

"Not a ninny. Far from it, too." Sherlock lifts his chin in defiance and his movement brings him back one step, where the waning moonlight slits in through the window and illuminates his face with the soft glow of the dying night. John's breath catches in his throat. Sherlock's so _beautiful_ , the sharp angles people normally regard as shattering to the image of beauty enunciating the unique out-of-worldly elegance of the detective. He isn't the common "wax figure" - quite the opposite really. The _flow_ of his flatmate is what makes him so alluring, and wax figures don't flow. The man is almost alien-like in his exquisiteness, but definitely more human than what society makes him out to be.

"Your thoughts are deafening. They're brilliant," Sherlock says. John watches, incredulous, as he swerves toward the bedroom door, his figure more elegant than John could ever wish to be. He almost blushes, but John Hamish Watson does not blush, especially not in a potentially moronic display of embarrassment when Sherlock peers into his mind and finds something inappropriate.

He does not blush as he drifts off to sleep with the little noises in the kitchen teasing his eardrums and the thought of Sherlock teasing his mind. He does not blush when he awakens to a solid arm curving around his torso, clutching his shirt with the grasp of a protective mother's. He does not blush when Sherlock murmurs, "John," in an octave lower than his usual voice, his sleep-mussed curls splayed across the pillow and his scent on John's tongue. He does blush unconsciously, however, when he snuggles closer to the oblivious detective and takes a tentative step back into dreamland with Sherlock's hand on his heart and a smile gracing his lips.

John thinks life's great when someone cares about you.


End file.
